by Nate Chinen

Anniversaries

11/01/2011

Chick Corea is going to be an easy man to find this month. He’s in residence at the Blue Note through Nov. 27, with a cavalcade of collaborators. (On Mondays he’ll rest, ceding the stage to some good jazz singers.) The booking seemed like a good excuse to reflect on Corea’s many-sided musical personality, which I did over here.

My personal history with Chick Corea’s music goes back almost as far as my active engagement with live jazz: as I’ve noted in JazzTimes and elsewhere, I had my head turned around by an Akoustic Band concert in 1990, in Honolulu. (An aside: pianist Robert Glasper once told me that the first jazz album he really paid attention to was Alive, the document taped during this tour. He had it on cassette.)

I’ve had occasion to see Corea many times since: in several different trios, and with Origin, Béla Fleck, Remembering Bud Powell and the Five Peace Band. (There are others I must be forgetting.) A few years ago I went to Austin to cover the Return to Forever reunion, observing rehearsals for a couple of days, taking in the big debut and then airing my thoughts, including some mild reservations.

Others have their own reservations about Corea -- I know of at least one prominent musician-blogger who decidely isn’t a fan -- and others still are hyper-specific about which iteration of the artist’s music they prefer.

Everybody digs Now He Sings. But there are those who get especially fired up by Crystal Silence or No Mystery or Three Quartets, and those who prefer the laser-etched contours of the Elektric Band.

I’m interested in this partisanship, which certainly exists with other jazz artists, but usually not in an accessible present tense. So lemme ask you, dear reader: which version of Chick works best for you, and why? What’s the album to beat? If you’re hitting the Blue Note this month, which night, or nights, will you be going? And if Chick is just not your guy, I want to hear from you, too. Have at it, below.

Well, here we are, closing the lid on another year in jazz, and I can’t decide what narrative to impose. Was this a time of mortal reflection, with the departures of Hank Jones, Abbey Lincoln and James Moody, among so many others? Or a season of triumph, as we observed the endless vitality of Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman and Roy Haynes? Was this the year that proved, with a horde of hard-charging younger talent, that jazz is -- in the words of a certain upstart summer festival -- not dead, but Undead? Or was it just another 12 months of hustling, out in the clubs and concert halls, and in the cloistered spaces where we do our solitary listening? Maybe Option E, for all of the above?

Whatever it was, we tracked and chronicled this year in real time (or, as our social-media metabolism might have it, hyper-real time), and I’m wondering how it looks to you now, with a wisp of hindsight. So to keep up a tradition of sorts at The Gig, I’ve asked you all to engage in a bit of year-end banter. Thanks for joining me -- this should be fun.

At this point you’ve probably sent in your ballots and compiled your lists, and it’ll be fascinating (to some of us, at least) to see where consensus forms. My Top 10 will be posted later this week, so for now I’m going to change the subject slightly. I recently appeared on BBC radio to air my conviction that pianists came out in full force this year. It would have been startlingly easy for me to construct a Top 10 of just pianistic efforts. Others might do the same for guitarists, or drummers.

About that commemoration: we like anniversaries and round numbers. It’s a way of organizing time, reselling material and sifting winners out of the historical mess. (We jazzbos are notalonein this.)

There was nothing perfunctory or contrived, though, about Ten, the album released this year by Moran’s Bandwagon, or Never Stop, the one put out by Iverson with the Bad Plus (above). In both cases you heard the cumulative weight and wisdom of the last 10 years, and a clear sense of intelligent artists taking the measure of their art.

A similar sense of purpose lit up several other commemorative moments this year. (I refer you to the aforementioned Rollins and Haynes.) Shaun and David, I’m sure you both paid close attention to the 10th anniversary of Ars Nova Workshop, the nonprofit Philadelphia presenting organization run by my friend Mark Christman. (More on that in a future post, perhaps.) We commemorate because we care.

And, in some rare cases, because we can make a lot of money. (I’m using the Royal We, in case there was any doubt.) Remember Bitches Brew? Perhaps you know that it turned 40 this year. Perhaps you noticed the all-out promotional push, the shiny new product, the unreleased live footage, the licensed Dogfish Head brew. I never said I was opposed to all of this, by the way.

Why bring up Bitches Brew? I’ll blame Kanye West. (Stay with me here, people.) In the musical world beyond jazz, which most of us also cover in one form or another, this is shaping up to be Annus Kanyebilis, with his new-school media strategy a proven success and his recorded opus landing rave upon rave. No one in pop was more compelling to watch this year, whether you believed you were witnessing aesthetic genius or riveted by a car crash. At times West himself seems unsure about which is which; you all saw the Runaway movie, I presume.

Thinking about how West conquered every room he entered this year, I drew the only parallel that seemed really apt: to post-Bitches Miles Davis, another frequently bedeviled African-American sound-sculptor drawn to aggressive reinvention, unbridled ego and rococo indulgence. This parallel doesn’t entirely flatter either artist.

But jazzfolk often complain about how their music gets left out of the mainstream conversation. Miles would have none of that, for better or for worse. If the timing had worked differently, I suspect he might have put in a cameo on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, even if that title is more Mingus-esque in syntax and scope. Look at how much steam can still be generated by Bitches Brew, all these years later. That level of cultural cachet seems to be precisely what West is reaching for.

Speaking of reaching, I believe this exhausts the air in the room, for now. I gladly pass the baton to Chris, out in Los Angeles. Take it in any direction you like, good sir, but just answer me this: was the Nels Cline Dirty Baby premiere as unmissable as it seemed? (Sub-question: how hard should I be kicking myself, still?) cheers to all, Nate

05/25/2010

Sun Ra would have turned 96, in earth years, last Saturday. Marshall Allen, who has led the Sun Ra Arkestra for some 15 years (and played in its ranks for more than 50), turns 86 today. According to recent custom, Allen and the band will perform a birthday gig, in their hometown of Philadelphia, under the aegis of the Ars Nova Workshop. In honor of all of this, here is a piece I wrote for a Style magazine in Philly last year, which provided me with a pretext for interviewing both George Clinton and Maurice White for the first time.

There are worlds, and there are worlds. For the visionary
composer, keyboardist, philosopher, bandleader and intergalactic traveler known
as Sun Ra, the planet was a way station, and music was both a vessel and a
channel. Throughout his earthly career, which roughly spanned the second half
of the last century, he engaged an impossibly broad-spectrum sweep of musical
ideas: big band swing and bebop along with future-sound electronics and ancient
African rhythms, funk and free jazz, psychedelic grooves and Bizarro doo-wop,
and much, much else besides. “It was a universal music,” attests George
Clinton, the Parliament-Funkadelic mastermind with an intergalactic angle of
his own. “There’s no box you can put it in, except that it makes you feel
good.”

So is it any wonder that in the 16 years since Sun Ra’s
departure, his influence has rippled across so many borders of culture and
genre? When soul-punk dynamo Janelle Monáe declares herself “an alien from
outer space,” or hip-hop trickster Lil Wayne rantsabout being a Martian,
they’re riding a wavelength best exemplified, if not generated, by the potent
precedent of Sun Ra. And those are just the more flagrant manifestations of a
process that reaches meaningfully into the worlds of rock, techno and
electronica, along with avant-garde jazz and new music. “He never got as much
recognition, even posthumously, as he should have,” says Jeff Parker, the
guitarist for Tortoise, the acclaimed Chicago post-rock band. “But the
influence, man, it’s everywhere.”

03/29/2010

Forty years ago this month, Miles Davis opened for Neil
Young at the Fillmore East. I wrote about their intersection a while back for an EMP Pop Conference, and
now the piece has
finally been released into the wild, thanks to the intrepid online magazine At
Length.

One animating idea in the piece is the power of unknowing.
At one point in Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography, by Jimmy McDonough, Young offers probably the single best analysis of
Crazy Horse:

08/21/2009

Today marks the 50th anniversary of Statehood -- Hawaii’s official admission to the Union. My father was a senior in high school then (McKinley, for all you locals), and he remembers it fondly. But from our current vantage, commemoration is bittersweet, as even a casual student of Hawaiian culture can attest. Here’s a version of a paper I presented at a recent EMP Pop Conference, which covers some of this ground through the lens of popular music (one song in particular).

This is the lilting solo version of “Over the Rainbow” recorded by Israel Kamakawiwo`ole, the Hawaiian music legend also known as Bruddah Iz. There’s a decent chance that you’ve heard it somewhere. On the soundtrack to a Hollywood star vehicle like Meet Joe Black, Finding Forrester or 50 First Dates, perhaps. Or during a pair of emotionally charged scenes in the NBC series ER and Scrubs. Or in one of untold thousands of earnest YouTube montages. Or during the seventh season of “American Idol,” when it was performed by a popular contender, complete with ukulele.

In any case, the ballad reaches straight for the heartstrings, as it was clearly intended to do.

But Kamakawiwo`ole, the Hawaiian music legend also known as Bruddah IZ, brought some coded context to the song that most listeners don’t begin to recognize. As an outspoken advocate of Hawaiian sovereignty, he knew the deeper shading of a song about longing for another place, where skies are still blue. His “Over the Rainbow” is a hymn of exile as well as longing, rich in metaphorical suggestion. Its impact has reached far and wide, eclipsing its veiled intentions. But those intentions tell us much about the world in which Kamakawiwo`ole lived, and the one that he never lived to see.